1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to the field of computers, and specifically to blade servers. Still more particularly, the present disclosure relates to managing Management Modules (MMs) that support blades in a blade server chassis.
2. Description of the Related Art
While early computer architectures utilized stand-alone single computers, often referenced as Personal Computers (PCs), more powerful modern computer systems often use multiple computers that are coupled together in a common center. An exemplary common center is known as a blade center, which utilizes multiple blades that are coupled by a common backbone in a blade chassis. Each blade is a pluggable board that comprises at least one processor, on-board memory, and an Input/Output (I/O) interface. The multiple blades are capable of communicating with one another, as well as sharing common resources, such as storage devices, monitors, input devices (keyboard, mouse), etc.
Current blade chassis (also known as blade centers) provide a mechanism whereby the Management Module (MM) can failover to a redundant MM under certain conditions. There is a deficiency in the art, however, in that scenarios in which this occurs is limited. There exist times wherein a standby MM cannot determine that it needs to take over for a failed MM. For example, the standby MM could have no idea that the primary MM was too busy or is not properly servicing interrupts sent from the blade service processors.